Creative America has a new pro-SOPA TV spot and an electronic billboard in …

Creative America is fighting back. The group, which represents NBC Universal, Viacom, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, Disney, and others in the TV and movie business, launched a new TV commercial today supporting SOPA and PIPA. A national print and radio campaign will follow.

But the highlight is a black animated banner ad that reads "What to do during an Internet blackout; it suggests reading books, listening to music, or watching a movie. The banner will be shown "on a huge billboard in New York's Times Square throughout the day on January 18th as an answer to those opponents of the bills who are blacking out their websites," writes Creative America.

The pro-SOPA TV spot

As for those participating in the protests, Creative America says that they are the real censors. "With the opponents of the bill trafficking in misinformation, fear tactics and public relations stunts like blacking out their websites—in essence censoring the Internet themselves—we thought it more important than ever to get the message out that these bills are reasoned, narrow, effective and necessary measures to combat foreign rogue sites which are preying on American consumers and costing American jobs," said Mike Nugent, Executive Director of Creative America in a statement.

Creative America also hosts a FAQ of its own designed to dispel common myths, among them the idea that SOPA could put Netflix and iTunes out of business. (Are people saying this?).

The group's frustration is evident. Yes, anti-SOPA misinformation is out there, but pro-SOPA misinformation and general point-missing has also been gushing like geyser.

Fact: DNS filtering is powered by rainbows

Creative America

In a battle of the lobbyists, Hollywood had clout for years. But fighting with the Internet? It's a whole different battle, and groups like Creative America haven't mastered the tactics. If they had, they probably wouldn't use their Twitter account to retweet irrelevant comments like, "Think it's okay to steal movies and music? I dare you to go to Walmart and try it. Online or in a store theft is theft."

They also don't have the numbers. Creative America's "grassroots" website has been "liked" 12,000 times on Facebook, and it has 1,622 Twitter followers. But the White House petitions against SOPA and PIPA attracted 100,000+ people—and Google's anti-SOPA petition today has already attracted 4.5 million signatures.

MonkeyPaw wrote:Calling themselves "creative" is a little generous, don't you think? Only Hollywood is allowed to steal ideas for profit! knbgnu wrote:Hey, they are creative. Do you have any idea how much much innovation it takes to take LOTR or Forrest Gump's figures and make them look like a net loss? creative? They have been pulling stunts like that since the beginning!

They also don't have the numbers. Creative America's "grassroots" website has been "liked" 12,000 times on Facebook, and it has 1,622 Twitter followers. But the White House petitions against SOPA and PIPA attracted 100,000+ people—and Google's anti-SOPA petition today has already attracted 4.5 million signatures.

Which is why they are fighting.

They cannot take true competition, if they can buy congress people they simply cannot understand when they say sit/stand/talk etc why YOU wont do it.

They are used to giving orders and you follow it... or else, but on the net there is true freedom.

You may be able to get the vice president of the most powerful nation on earth to parrot what you say but you cannot get a 16 year old to promise not to go to a website you don't want him to go to.

How can you possibly use the phrase "creative America"? It's not the artists that are fighting back, but the artist-exploiting middlemen who don't have a creative bone in their bodies (and as if the tech sector isn't creative ).

If they think DNS filtering is being used to fight spam it shows just how ignorant they are with how technology works. Spam filtering isn't done by stopping DNS of a domain. Any use of DNS is to propagate information, AND is entirely by choice of the postmaster for that mail service. The same spam filtering done via DNS could be done via BGP, or any other random protocol. That ignores how much other work goes into spam filtering, and that it's still NOT FOOL PROOF! Piracy mitigation is the same kind of arms race as spam, I will give them that.

I think the protests today were/are awesome, but this is sort of a one-trick pony. Wikipedia cannot shut down every time there's a law it doesn't like (even if that law causes an existential crisis for the organization), and Google asking users to sign petitions will get old fast. The thing the special interests and lobbyists have figured out is how to mobilize people to act in ways that stimulate the politicians. That's why, as Rep. Lofgren (D-CA) has said, Bush's immigration reforms were killed years ago and haven't been brought up again since: "the phone lines melted with activity." Congress is run by staffers, and the non-intern staffers are typically middle-aged to oldish wonks or lawyers who know the old Washington way and probably know jack about technology. They respond to old ways of support: money, phone calls, money, letters, money, personal lobbying, money, etc.

The tech industry will live and die by its ability to leverage its numbers and its users in both the old ways and the new ways. Washington isn't going to learn that the Internet is neither a dump truck or a series of tubes, especially if campaign contributions depend on that. But if Erick Erickson of RedState.com or Matt Yglesias of ThinkProgress join our side, and we can even find ways to target the supporters of this legislation financially (using their "follow the money" tactic against them would make me supremely happy, e.g. possibly boycotting products advertised on content networks that support or have parents that support SOPA/PIPA like ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN, etc. - it'd be hard, but GoDaddy switched sides after only ~20k users of the eventual 100k left).

That is how politics is played. It is dirty, myopic, and super dramatic. Politics is like tech news, except fried in rhetoric after the facts have boiled away. We somehow need to master that without turning the industry into the next Big Content.

I love it how when you read between the lines, their comeback boils down to, "Those companies shouldn't be allowed to protest. Censorship is OUR job. So when these bills pass, you will pretend nothing is wrong. You'll read a book instead. Do as we say, you little punks."

They just don't realize that the damage has already been done. The Internet community has dealt a massive blow, and reps in both Congress and the Senate are quickly going anti-SOPA. Creative America can't reverse the tide with a couple of TV ads - nobody pays attention to TV ads. It's amazing to see how out-of-touch they are.

I love it how when you read between the lines, their comeback boils down to, "Those companies shouldn't be allowed to protest. Censorship is OUR job. So when these bills pass, you will pretend nothing is wrong. You'll read a book instead. Do as we say, you little punks."

They just don't realize that the damage has already been done. The Internet community has dealt a massive blow, and reps in both Congress and the Senate are quickly going anti-SOPA. Creative America can't reverse the tide with a couple of TV ads - nobody pays attention to TV ads. It's amazing to see how out-of-touch they are.

Be glad they're out of touch - if they actually figured out what to do, it might make things harder. Remember the old saying: "Be thankful for smart allies and stupid enemies."

With the opponents of the bill trafficking in misinformation, fear tactics and public relations stunts like blacking out their websites—in essence censoring the Internet themselves

Censoring the Internet themselves? Who comes up with this shit? I guess every time you remove some text from a web page, you're censoring the Internet. Oh god, I even removed some text from this post before posting it! I'm guilty too!

I'm sorry, I couldn't help it. I mean, come in, "Creative America" and "Support Americaa creative community." I guess by "community" they mean the uber rich billionaires at Sony, Disney, etc? At least they're wasting some of their money on crappy TV ads that will do nothing.

I am done with the rehashed shite that Hollywood and TV stations put out.

This, this, and this.

If you're paying attention, all of the truly original movies and programming are coming from outside of the US prior to being reshot and neatly packaged with the stars that we fondly remember. Or, if not, they're clearly derivative of another work in another media type (books, theater, etc).

I actually agree with Creative America on one aspect. Pick up a book. Absolutely. What will their clients do? Enter the already torn and tumultuous book publishing industry, already partially blown open via self-publishing avenues in order to recover their precious profits? I'll even take it a step further and suggest a book: 1984 by George Orwell.

Be glad they're out of touch - if they actually figured out what to do, it might make things harder. Remember the old saying: "Be thankful for smart allies and stupid enemies."

You are wrong sir! Wrong I say! Thing is the internet has been around for longer than most of the kids on it today have been alive, but the people making laws and such seem so far out of touch that making a good decision seems unlikely. As a content creator you have to get paid to make content generation worth while, so giving IP holders some more leverage makes sense at it's core. The bill though seems written by people who have no idea how this all works though. Obama made good use of the internet but I have a feeling these people debating this thing are like McCain trying to figure out YouTube take downs.

Saying these people being out of touch is "good" is like giving a surgeon a chainsaw to work with. The concept of SOPA (the operation) is good, but the method (the chainsaw) ends up killing the patient 9 times out of 10.

So now we're getting hit with a pro-SOPA media blitz, as would be expected. On our side, the next step is to get a noticeable boycott going. A few people have already been doing it, a few bloggers are calling for it, but it needs to get much bigger. Boycott movies and new DVD purchases for starters and right away.. Money is the bottom line.

Fuck yes I would! I would need a 3D printer from the future to do it though.

Best response I've ever read to that retarded slogan. You win this thread, dude.

On topic, while I know SOPA's "supporters" (read: people who stand to profit massively from breaking the internet) are all full of shit, I wonder to what degree they actually believe their own rhetoric. Granted, most of it must have started as simply "doing what's best for our company, fuck everyone else" that all corporations are guilty of once they reach a certain size, but it seems to have evolved into some fanatical, no-compromise, bordering-a-religion status that even gigantic, take-no-prisoners companies like Microsoft and Apple haven't come to in their worst legal battles.